Sidney and Beatrice Webb : a new form of public history

Feske, Victor
(1996)
Sidney and Beatrice Webb : a new form of public history.
In:
From Belloc to Churchill: private scholars, public culture, and the crisis of British liberalism, 1900-1939.
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, pp. 61-97.
ISBN 0-8078-2295-7

Abstract

" the Webbs simply cannot be understood without taking account of their historical scholarship. The sheer scale of the couple's historiographical output testifies to their own ordering of priorities and therefore demands careful attention. The 1920 edition of The history of Trade Unionism (first published in 1894) approaches eight hundred pages in length and English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act (1904-29), the product of nearly three decades of intense labor, comprises eleven very thick and forbidding volumes. Few have recognized that the Webbs invested so much time and effort in producing this mass of paper because of their belief in the centrality of history to contemporary political questions. Much like Belloc, they comprehended the inextricably intimate connection between history and theory, between the power of the past and the present to shape the future." - p. 62.